A television remote control and some portable electronic devices, such as a cell phone, are difficult to use for text-based searching with current text input methods, particularly due to the limited set of input keys available on such devices. For example, other than the various configuration and television-specific input keys, a television remote control only has a standard numeric input keypad that includes the numbers zero through nine to input a channel selection. A viewer cannot easily input letters for a text search in an electronic program guide to search for a specific program, music, television content, or various other applications that may be available via the viewer's cable provider or other television system content provider. Further, conventional text searching techniques require that a user-entered search term be spelled correctly to locate the desired term.
Other electronic devices, such as a cell phone for example, are typically equipped with a conventional alphanumeric input keypad that includes the numbers zero through nine along with the alphabetic characters “A” to “Z”. Although zero (0) through nine (9) is a total of ten input keys, an alphanumeric or numeric input keypad is commonly referred to as a “9-key” keypad. The letters on a “9-key” keypad are distributed along with the numbers two (2) through nine (9). For example, the number two (2) includes the letters “A”, “B”, and “C”, the number three (3) includes the letters “D”, “E”, and “F”, and so on with each consecutive number being associated with the next consecutive three letters. The letters “Q” and “Z” may not be included on some keypads, but if they are, the number seven (7) has four associated letters to include “Q” and the number nine (9) has four associated letters to include “Z”.
There are techniques available to enter text with an alphanumeric “9-key” keypad, however they are cumbersome and in some cases, can require more user inputs than would actually be required to input a text string for the word itself, such as with a computer keyboard. For example, multi-tapping (also referred to as triple tap) is a technique to enter text and/or letters with a “9-key” keypad, such as with a cell phone to create a text message. As described above, the letters “A”, “B”, and “C” are associated with the number two (2) input key on the keypad. Pressing the input key once enters an “A”, twice enters a “B”, three times enters a “C”, and four times enters a “4”. Spelling out even short words for a text input can require multiple key entries. For example, to spell out “CAB”, a user would have to press the number two (2) input key a total of six times—three more inputs than would even be necessary with a conventional keyboard.
An alternative text-entry technique is “T9” (“text on nine keys”) which selects a letter that is associated with a key input to spell a word correctly based on a likelihood of letter combinations. With “T9”, a user may only have to press an input key once rather than multiple times as with multi-tapping. For example, to again spell out “CAB”, a user would only have to press the number two (2) input key a total of three times (once for “C”, twice for “CC”, and a third time for “CAB”). The “T9” technique is not without its limitations however. Depending on the presumed likely letter combinations, a user may have to switch back to multi-tapping to create a word that “T9” does not recognize, or the user may have to input several “T9” key combinations to create the word.
Irrespective of the technique implemented to enter text with an alphanumeric “9-key” keypad, the conventional text input techniques are cumbersome, often require more key inputs than would otherwise be necessary, and/or require unnatural combinations of key inputs.